Well, it's a memoir.I wrote and I wrote, and I tore up everything, and I wrote some more. After a while I didn't know why I was writing. My original desire, complicated enough, became a grueling compulsion, partly in spite of Sylvia. I was doing hard work in the cold room, much harder than necessary, in the hope that it would justify itself."This isn't about the memoir but I am taking it anyway.Sylvia: a Novel, according to the back blurb, was a story-length memoir first and then appeared again with "weird delirium" (not my words) of the 1960s and modern marriage. I half-assed read the back of the book and somehow came away with the idea that it was added onto, and I really can't justify this next part at all, from a magazine article. Where did I get magazine article from? The publication date says 1990. The events take place in 1963, which is when I think it was first written down. Right or wrong, I couldn't get the idea that Michaels took a bit of writing about something that happened to him (magazine article came from the writing exercise feel!) and added to it decades later out of the back of my mind. Writing to deal with something becomes something else and it was like the motives changed now. I don't really want to criticize the book for motives. That wasn't what I really thought about it.But.... It's a memoir.Michaels married Sylvia. He married Sylvia, he says, because marriage would solidify them. The fights whispering I'm sorry, the kamikaze planes would stop shooting down peace on earth and all systems go for set flight plans for wedded bliss blah blah blah. He married her anyway. He knew what he knew and he did it anyway. Listen, officer! I didn't know! My hands are clean except for these ink stains on the fingers. You can tell by my ink stains that I was wholly present the whole time.There is no way that there was nothing else to Sylvia than their marriage. I have known women who don't seem present without the company of a man. I don't care. I don't believe it. Sylvia of 'Sylvia' is wife of Leonard Michaels. If she is a person without him it is listening to her "crazy" friend Agatha. (Agatha who is sexualized, so-called demeaned, offering up for an audience to her one listener. How is that different than writing a memoir?) She had attempted suicide before they had met. At least there was a scar on her wrist. He denies the attempt but then brushes away the bloodless (yeah right!) attempt as "She was good at it because she had done it before" (not an exact quote). He seems to be asking someone, maybe himself, in the writing if he was treating Sylvia like the whore she thought he was when he would walk ahead of her. The constant testing of her place. How is that different than writing a memoir? Turns to the audience: Listen to this chick, right? She's totally nuts! It's crazy, I can't do anything right. I don't want to criticize for this. 'Sylvia' doesn't always come off like this, exactly. But it's that whole writing about it in a memoir. She's dead and wasn't he in the right? She was a crazy bitch, right? I wanted a Sylvia that was a whole Sylvia, or even a submerged in a glass half empty Sylvia, not only his wife.Why did he marry her when he knew what she was like? He wouldn't ask the right questions then and he doesn't answer with the right question in the book. Patterns are their own hypnosis. Winners and losers is wrong."It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it."No, that's not fooling me. It might have something to do with someone who would try to win the past by writing a memoir. I did like this description of writing a lot. "Writing a story wasn't as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I'd find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn't. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me."I felt more turmoil about his struggle to get out of the way about his writing than I did for his marriage. I could relate to this and I also related to pretty much the first information he relays about himself is that he's a person who likes to read (as if that's the only thing he could think of to say. Not off to a good start for a memoirist!). It was moving when he saw his own happiness in his own handwriting when apart from her, before her death. That was how he felt. What the hell does the right thing have to do with anything? Happiness away from something you know in your bones is not good for you beats any after the fact justification for what sounds good to explain something you just know. Oh. That's what I'm doing in this review... I didn't love this book and I don't want to criticize it because I didn't hate it. I know in my bones it isn't in my bones. But did she really kill herself because she wasn't with him? Maybe Michaels couldn't get out of the way enough to really write about it. There are illustrations by a "Sylvia Bloch". I don't want to know if they were the same Sylvia. I know they are... They look childish and helpless. She's in most of them. He's laying down like someone would lay down on train tracks. (Sylvia would be true if he ever did. He is too self conscious about his struggles to be a writer. Ugh! Writers.) Maybe it's a weird thing to criticize someone's life story for lying or unwillingness but... it's a memoir. Why would you write one of these if you were gonna hide behind Walker Percy quotes about the '60s? (I don't think I liked The Moviegoer. I'm not gonna check my gr ratings in case I rated it highly. Jesus, that's such a self serving memoir move there, Mariel!)Larry McMurtry (of Lonesome Dove fame. Best book ever!) says on the back flap: "One of the strongest and most arresting prose talents of his generation". Okay, Michaels is pretty darn good at prose at times. But didn't he blurb something similar about Barry Hannah? Man, you blurbers are all the same. (Some other Mariel review from 2011: "Man, I hate memoirs.")Edit- Ok, the hate has set in! I was thinking about this book more and it started worrying me more and more how Michaels complained Sylvia kept him from writing. I'm slow. Yeah, what a bastard. He makes me hate writing even more. If you don't want to get at what matters then why do it?
Essentially a guidebook on how not to fall in love for the first time, Sylvia chronicles the codependent relationship between Leonard Michaels and his first wife, a brilliant and unstable orphan coming of age in NYC in the late 1960s. The two meet in a filthy studio on McDougal Street and it is there that they stay; whether fighting viciously or eating their nightly dinner in bed, the pair are inseparable and insufferable until their inevitable split.Despite Syliva's protests when he leaves her in their bed for his desk, it is within the four walls of their studio that Michaels begins writing in earnest. With diary entries from the time of the relationship interspersed among the narrative, Michaels illustrates how his inexperience renders him unable to see beyond his immediate circumstances, even when alternatives are well within reach. The one outlet he has is his writing, and Sylvia is as much a testament to the therapeutic nature of art as it is a record of romantic despair. But for Sylvia, whose intelligence and potential are made clear from the beginning, refuge remains elusive, as does her character in general. "Leonard" would be a more fitting title for this compelling short work.
What do You think about Sylvia (2007)?
It's monotonous and depressing, and most of the characters are unpleasant. Nevertheless, the writing is strong and well-crafted, and the story is very powerful and moving. I found much painful truth in this short book, and it reminded me of some events in my own life, although I'm thankful that I've never experienced anything this extreme. However, I feel that many readers will be able to relate to these scenes of inexplicable conflict between couples, even if their experiences will probably be milder than what the author describes in this fictionalized memoir. Sylvia makes an interesting companion piece to another book that takes place in the early 60s, Revolutionary Road, although Sylvia was more minimalistic, flinty, and poetic, and its characters made the couple in Revolutionary Road look very very bourgeois.
—John
A few close friends love this book. Like LOOOVVE. But I don't.Yes, it is beautifully written. Yes, it is filled with raw and intense pain. Yes, it made me cry. But it is supposed to be a portrait, a mature reflection of a hideously dysfunctional relationship. And in one sense it works. I get how Michaels is young and naive and over his head. I get Sylvia's insanity (never called that, but that's what it is). I get the intensity of their fights. I feel his hopelessness. But I never understood why he loved her. I never got a sense of who she was or how she was appealing. He describes her as attractive but then has a mutual friend say, "she's not beautiful, you know." (Why did he do that? To show that it wasn't her beauty that held him entranced?) He claims she's smart but never shows it. What's the appeal? What is the basis of his love? Who was the woman he was in love with? Who was Sylvia?It's 2014 and I don't ever want to read another story about a sad sack young man in love with a "crazy." I never want to see another portrayal of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It's time to see the "crazy" or the Manic Pixie Dream Girl write books and movies and comics about the creepy assholes that are in love with them. THAT is something I'd like to read.
—Troy
I suppose we all have the one doozy of a destructive relationship from our pasts. (Hopefully it's in the past.) Writer Leonard Michaels' short quasi memoir/novel about his brief yet fiery relationship with the unstable Sylvia of the title is deceivingly simple, familiar, yet never less than moving. Told in the first person and littered with actual (?) journal entries, its power springs from an empathetic approach toward a familiar and tragic story. Sylvia is a monster, but never less than sympathetic and Michaels uses the the early 1960s in New York setting to great effect. The reader understands implicitly why Michaels, despite Sylvia's increasingly mental instability, can't bring himself to leave her, casting the ultimate tragic die.
—Eric
